Re: Tools to managing your finance

The problem with autopay is, I don't know how much $ to set in auto-pay in order to manage proper utilization. E.g; if I spend $100 on one CC and my autopay on that is $110. I will end up paying $10 over. Some time the spend could be really HIGH too.

Re: Tools to managing your finance

A couple of suggestions:1). Contact your card accounts and have them move your due dates to a uniform date. I have mine equally divided to a date 7 days past my bi-weekly pay checks.2). Use a service like Prisim or Mint to monitor and notify you of upcoming due dates, deposits and low balances.

Re: Tools to managing your finance

My personal solution is to put any bill that can be paid via CC on a CC and set those bills to autopay. The remaining bills I also do autopay for out of checking, though in my case these types of bills are static most of the time so I know in advance how much needs to be in checking for those to clear (mortgage, car payment, and only the mortgage amount changes year to year as property taxes change).

This approach drops me from managing 7-8 monthly expenses to managing 2 cards. As a safety net, you can set up autopay for the minimum due for those rare times when you don't remember to PIF before the due date.

Re: Tools to managing your finance

The problem with autopay is, I don't know how much $ to set in auto-pay in order to manage proper utilization. E.g; if I spend $100 on one CC and my autopay on that is $110. I will end up paying $10 over. Some time the spend could be really HIGH too.

How do you fix that issue?

For the autopay on some cards you will have the option of paying the current balance, rather than the statement balance. If you chose the current balance then you'd be much more likely to have your total utilization very low (e.g. 1-5%), as long as you chose statement balance on one card.

The more relevant question is why you'd want your utilization hyperlow at all times. A very low utilization makes sense in the 40 days prior to applying for credit, but surely you are not applying for credit all the time. Increasing your total credit limit to a reasonable level (via CLIs, etc.) plus setting your cards to PIF the statement balance should solve the problem. You can tweak that by setting a few cards to PIF the current balance. And finally if you spend a huge amount on one card, far more than usual, you'll know that and can simply make one manual payment.

Re: Tools to managing your finance

1. All bills that can be paid by CC is set to autopay from CCs. Car, dental, health insurance ...etc..

2. All bills that can't be paid by CC is set to autopay from one of my checking accounts. Mortgage, utility, water/sewer...etc..

3. All bills that doesn't accept autopay is paid by auto billpay from checking, I only have one, homeowner association fee.

4. (Optional) Assuming you have some savings put away, setup a high yield checking account that pays 3-5% APY up to a maximum cap (ie 10k-30k) with some monthly requirements (ie debit card transactions), use this checking account as your payment account for all your CCs. Since this account will always have a balance close to the maximum cap, it removes the possibility of insufficient funds/returned payment and eliminates the need to scramble funds from savings to checking prior to CC autopays. The 2 accounts I recommend are WyHy FCU (15k/12 debit) and Orion FCU (30k/8 debits).

5. Set all CCs on autopay to pay the full statement balance on or before due date pulling from the rewards checking above (or regular checking), you can still make extra manual payments on top of the autopay if you wish/need (micromanage UTI before credit app/large purchases...etc.), most autopay systems are smart enough to automatically adjust autopay based on manual payments but there are some exceptions where autopay will still pull the statement balance after manual payments, you will need to either adjust autopay (ie CapOne) or cancel autopay then reset autopay after making manual payments (ie PenFed).

6. Like already suggested above, money management software will help greatly in monitoring all accounts if you have a lot of CCs and deposit accounts, I use Mint, it gives me realtime monitoring of all CC/deposit account transactions.

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IMPORTANT INFORMATION: All FICO® Score products made available on myFICO.com include a FICO® Score 8, along with additional FICO® Score versions. Your lender or insurer may use a different FICO® Score than the versions you receive from myFICO, or another type of credit score altogether. Learn more about other FICO Score versions.

FICO, myFICO, Score Watch, The score lenders use, and The Score That Matters are trademarks or registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation. Equifax Credit Report is a trademark of Equifax, Inc. and its affiliated companies. Many factors affect your FICO Score and the interest rates you may receive. Fair Isaac is not a credit repair organization as defined under federal or state law, including the Credit Repair Organizations Act. Fair Isaac does not provide "credit repair" services or advice or assistance regarding "rebuilding" or "improving" your credit record, credit history or credit rating. FTC's website on credit.